By Ruben Castaneda
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 13, 1996; Page A1

A reinvigorated Hurricane Bertha roared into the North and South Carolina coasts Friday, strafing beach resorts with fierce 105 mph winds, dumping heavy rain and spawning tornadoes. By early this morning the weakened storm system was moving into Virginia.

The conditions resulted in one death in Kitty Hawk, where news services reported a driver was killed in a traffic accident. Eight other deaths have been attributed to the storm – six in the Caribbean and two in Florida – since Bertha began spiraling north last week.

After skirting over Cape Fear at midday Friday, the 35-mile-wide eye of the storm made landfall at Wrightsville Beach and turned inland toward the sprawling Camp Lejeune Marine base, where six people were reported injured.

Forecasters said Bertha, whose winds had diminished to 75 mph – barely over hurricane strength – by midnight, was sending its first outer rain bands to the Washington area and would bring heavier squalls with as much as four inches of rain by this afternoon before skittering northeastward as a tropical storm or tropical depression. By 1 a.m. today the storm was 75 miles southwest of Norfolk and forecasters said Bertha would soon be downgraded to a tropical storm.

Virginia officials counted "four or five" unconfirmed reports of tornadoes, including one in the Smithfield area, and a twister touched down in Raleigh, but no injuries were cited.

Winds of 30 to 40 mph were expected in the Washington area today with as much as six inches of rain possible in parts of the Eastern Shore, and officials in Ocean City suggested that potential visitors avoid arriving between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. today, when Bertha was forecast to be in that area.

High winds caused authorities to close the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel last night, and storm surges of two to three feet on the Chesapeake Bay and up to two feet in the tidal Potomac were anticipated as Bertha's low pressure combined with high tides.

Flash floods were possible along the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, across Maryland, Virginia and in the District, forecasters said. Late yesterday, hurricane warnings remained in effect from Topsail Beach, N.C., to Chincoteague, Va., with tropical storm warnings posted north of there to New Hampshire.

Nearly 400,000 North Carolinians and 42,000 Virginians were without electricity, and thousands were in shelters, including 700 late last night in southern Virginia.

Local communities in the Hampton Roads area declared a state of emergency as they braced for the storm's arrival. Officials there were caught off guard with sketchy evacuation plans because earlier projections had the storm heading inland toward Raleigh.

South Carolina, where officials had evacuated the Myrtle Beach resort strip on Thursday, reported relatively minimal structural damage to buildings. "It seems to have passed over South Carolina at the last minute," said Dana Mishoe, a spokeswoman at the state's emergency center in Columbia. Gov. David M. Beasley (R) authorized local officials there yesterday afternoon to begin allowing residents to begin to return to their homes.

In Washington, the Federal Emergency Management Agency took its national response team off alert status, leaving regional officials to cope with the storm. "It's terrific news," said FEMA spokeswoman Ann Barre. "The damage is not as bad" as first feared.

But officials in North Carolina said seven to nine feet of ocean water had washed over some of the fragile barrier islands and that it was too soon to estimate the amount of destruction.

Fueled by the warm Gulf Stream waters, Bertha's force intensified before her eye made landfall near the tip of Cape Fear, south of Wilmington. The slow-moving storm then edged along the coast, uprooting huge trees, snapping others in half, and leaving live power lines dancing on the streets in the ripping wind.

Carolina Beach and Kure Beach, about 15 miles east of here, took the hardest blows. Two fishing piers were heavily damaged, storefront windows were shattered, roofs blown off homes and shingles were snapped off rooftops like dry leaves. A carnival Ferris wheel reportedly rolled off its foundation.

"Everything's just torn apart," Allen Sipe of Kure Beach told the Associated Press.

The storm hit at an economically sensitive time for the Carolinas, during the start of their all-important tourism season, which runs from mid-July to late-August. Evacuation of 250,000 residents and vacationers that started Wednesday in many communities along the coast already cost the states' coastal tourism industry nearly $100 million. However, some of that was made up inland, as hotels as far away as Raleigh quickly filled to capacity with tourists and residents escaping the storm.

Residents of Wilmington, a port city of 61,000, coped remarkably well. In anticipation of Bertha, Wilmington virtually shut down yesterday morning, with only emergency workers, hotel employees and a few members of the news media on hand.

Thousands of residents who were evacuated from the coast found refuge with family and friends inland. Others jammed into local hotels, where they joined people whose vacations were derailed by the hurricane.

At the Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel, one of the few facilities with emergency power generators, workers set up a candlelight buffet of cold cuts, fruit and potato chips in an large ballroom. Hotel guests watched television, listened to the radio or played cards.

At the Days Inn Hotel, manager Larry Morris passed out Chemlites, plastic tubes which contain chemicals that produce light when the tube is snapped. "The military uses these," said Morris, who is retired from the Army. "They're safer than candles and it's easier than going out and buying a lot flashlights and batteries."

"I can't think of anything more they can do," said Cathy Bordeux. Along with her husband and their teenage daughter, Bordeux was evacuated from her trailer park home near Carolina Beach on Wednesday.

"It's nature, you go with it," said Robert Thorburn, who also checked into the Howard Johnson on Wednesday after being evacuated from his beachfront home. "When you buy beachfront property, you weigh the pros and the cons. It's God's will, as far as I'm concerned."

In Virginia Beach, vacationing families and hurricane-gawkers still strolled by the dozens along the city's beachfront. "We thought about staying home and decided to go for broke," said Ellis R. Collins, 55, a vacationing Pittsburgh engineer who took his two grandchildren wading in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. "We thought we'd come down and hope we wouldn't get hurt."

"We went through Hugo and survived that one, so we just had to see what's out here," said Barbara Kasten, 39, with her son, William, 10, of Norfolk, as a stiff wind pressed down the city's three-mile boardwalk.

Some flooding was expected in the Hampton Roads area, home to about 1.5 million people, and in the lightly settled Eastern Shore peninsula across the Chesapeake Bay. "The whole area of Virginia is on a hurricane warning," said Janet Clements, spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Emergency Services. "It's really too late to get out on the road and move. Basically people just need to hunker down at home."

Forecasters said Bertha's eye would pass approximately 25 miles west of Norfolk at roughly 2:30 a.m. today, but officials said they hoped that the storm's arrival at low tide would hold damage to a minimum.

"We're still looking at five to eight inches of rain for the entire event," Norfolk city spokesman James Talbot said.

Elsewhere in Virginia, authorities closed the 17-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel at 9:45 last night, after winds hit 75 mph, the Virginia Department of Transportation reported. The highway provides the sole drivable link between Hampton Roads and Virginia's Eastern Shore.

In Virginia Beach, host to 2 million visitors a year, only a handful of shops and homes were boarded up along a 29-mile coastline. At T-Shirt Paradise, across from the city pier, manager Tony K. Blair was capitalizing. "The weather keeps bringing people in," Blair said. "They have nothing to do but spend money."

Staff writers Anthony Faiola and Bill McAllister in Washington and Spencer S. Hsu in Virginia Beach contributed to this article.